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Major map exhibitions are frequently accompanied by lavishly illustrated books: London: A Life in Maps and the Magnificent Maps exhibitions had their eponymous books (London: A Life in Maps and Magnificent Maps), and the Chicago Festival of Maps was accompanied by Maps: Finding Our Place in the World.

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It’s been a little over four years since I joined Twitter and a year since I started blogging. What I originally considered a way to share information about my farm has evolved into something that feeds my passion for informed discussion and logical debate. The farmers, scientists and bloggers I’ve encountered have radically altered the way I view the world and certain issues, GMOs in particular. Yet every once in a while, I am reminded that to be human is to be subjective, and that bias can lead people to accept flaws in one argument that they would not tolerate in another.

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E. Forbes Smiley III was a well-known and well-connected map dealer, an expert who helped build the Slaughter and Leventhal map collections. Then in 2005 he was caught — on videotape — stealing maps from Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Libraries he had frequented scrambled to check their own holdings and found additional maps missing. Smiley, who cooperated with the authorities, would eventually be sentenced to 3½ years for stealing nearly 100 maps from the British, Boston Public, New York Public, Harvard and Yale libraries, among others. The libraries believed he stole many more.

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One of Shawville’s pharmacists and his wife were killed in a head-on collision on Route 148 earlier this week. (Yes, he was our pharmacist.) In its coverage, CBC News identifies the portion of Route 148 between Luskville and Quyon as one of five dangerous stretches of highway in the Ottawa area, with nine fatal crashes between 2001 and 2011.

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The Parti Québécois saw its Charter of Values a vote-getter, a popular measure intended to help it win the next election. Well, obviously it didn’t. The conventional wisdom during the campaign was that the electorate was more in favour of the Charter than against it, but the Charter was well down on the list of priorities. Since the PQ’s rout at the polls earlier this month, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Charter did the PQ more harm than good.

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The Pontiac Journal reports the results of an audit the Western Quebec School Board commissioned into its own procurement and contracting policies, this done in the wake of allegations of impropriety involving a WQSB director and a construction company. But buried in the lede, and apparently unrelated to the O’Shea allegations, are revelations that contracts were done rather sloppily:

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According to a news release published yesterday and widely parroted around the web, Walmart is poised to takes its “lowest price is the law” approach to some of its organic offerings, promising to make organic food “affordable” to all. According to their own research, 91% of its shoppers would buy organic food if the price were the same. By partnering with the Wild Oats organic food brand, they plan to introduce a line of organic products priced the same as non-organic equivalents.

On the surface, it sounds do-able. As I’ve pointed out before, the organic premium is largely a factor of economies of scale in transportation, processing, marketing, and distribution, as well as the laws of supply and demand that allow all players in the food chain to earn a little extra along the way (whether they’ve incurred all that extra cost or not). This also means that the premium paid to the grower is rarely directly reflected in the retail price.

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Advocating for agriculture is a worthwhile goal, no doubt. But who knows what being an agvocate means? Other agvocates. Your typical non farmer thinks you just spelt advocate wrong. The label serves only to identify yourself to others in the industry, most often those who farm the same way you do.

Lately, I’ve become frustrated and disillusioned with where I see agvocacy heading, primarily on twitter. Calling consumers ignorant, stupid, uneducated, brain dead, or scientifically illiterate for not understanding the industry is common. For many farmers, it’s the only life they’ve known.